Poetry nights
The Touchstone Poetry Nights have sprung from the writing sessions we organized at Touchstone. They are hosted by Minas and Myrthe.
We discovered that many people who are connected to Touchstone share a love for Poetry and we envisioned organizing something with a low threshold, where people can share their work, in unfinished or finished stage (if writings are ever finished), and where we can have conversations about poetry, writing processes and whatever else might come to the surface concerning this matter.
On some nights we invite two or three guests to share their work in a more staged setting, other times we have a more loose setting where we invite everyone to just show up and bring their own work or favorite poems or poets, without a plan. We try to crack the evening open into conversations as much as possible. Mostly just by association, and this is how the evening unfolds, always different, always beautiful.
We love to see people bringing their favorite books as if they bring their friends (or how they bring their actual friends). We love it how people enter Touchstone with their handwritten papers, a poem quickly noted on a paper just before they left their houses, or how people translate their favourite poetry from their mother tongue, to be able to share it, because there is no English translation yet. How different languages, cultures and wor(l)ds fill and enrich Touchstone. We love to see how the group of people grows and how the evenings become more and more fruitful (without that being the goal), how we see familiar faces showing up every edition and new faces, so it feels like we are creating an ongoing conversation, with no pretensions.
So if you love poetry, do come over to share your work or to listen to other people’s work, and talk poetry!